Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800–1914

Catherine Mills

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351905381
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book explores the emergence and growth of state responsibility for safer and healthier working practices in British mining and the responses of labour and industry to expanding regulation and control. It begins with an assessment of working practice in the coal and metalliferous mining industries at the dawn of the nineteenth century and the hazards involved for the miners, before charting the rise of reforming interest in these industries. The 1850 Act for the Inspection of Coal Mines in Great Britain brought tighter legislation in coal mining, yet the metalliferous miners continued to work without government-regulated safety and health controls until the early 1870s. The author explores the reasons for this, taking into account socio-economic, environmental, medical, technical, and cultural factors that determined the chronology and nature of early reform. The comparative approach between the coal and metalliferous mining sectors provides a useful model for exploring the significance of organized labour in gaining health and safety concessions, particularly as the miners in the metalliferous sector, in contrast to the colliers who unionised early, placed a high value on independence and self-sufficiency in the workplace. As an investigation into the formation of health and safety legislation in a major industry, this work will be valuable to all those with an interest in medical history, occupational health, legal history, and the social history of work in the nineteenth century.

Chapter 1

Industrialization and the Frequency and Nature of Risk

The social consequences of industrialization, according to Oliver MacDonagh’s theory of social progress, operated as a catalyst for the adoption of new responsibilities by government in the early nineteenth century.¹ The British mining industries witnessed the application of mechanical power to winding and pumping and the introduction of chemical explosives from the late seventeenth, throughout the eighteenth and into the early nineteenth centuries that facilitated the exploitation of mineral wealth at depth and on a much larger scale. Taking MacDonagh’s assumption as the starting point for the story of mining health and safety reform, this opening chapter asks in what way and to what extent did the nature and frequency of occupational injuries and diseases change as both the coal and metalliferous mining sectors industrialized. The technological advances that facilitated mining at depth are discussed. Rather than provide a definitive history of innovation in mining practice, which has been extensively covered elsewhere, this chapter aims to set the scene in terms of underground working conditions in the early to mid nineteenth century, particularly in relation to metalliferous sectors where knowledge is sparse.²

The geological and geographical location of mineral deposits had a profound influence on all aspects of mining activity, including development and application of technology and the dangers to which underground labour was exposed.³ Coal is located in shallow horizontal deposits sandwiched between layers of shale, sand, ironstone and fire clay ranging in thickness from a few inches to several hundred feet. Although coal is largely ubiquitous throughout the British Isles, one foot was generally considered as the minimum viable thickness for economic extraction. Most workable seams in Britain were between two to 10 feet with the exception of the ‘thick’, running beneath what became known as the Black Country, which was around 10 metres.

Coal was first extracted where it outcropped at the surface and the seam was followed underground either by a drift (adit) tunnelled horizontally into the hillside or from a series of shafts sunk vertically on the seam depending on the local topography. Access was by ladder and candlelight provided illumination. Coal was hand-hewn by pick around the base of the shaft, and hauled to the surface in a lightweight wicker basket known as a corve. This was either carried manually up the ladder or hauled by a simple hand-operated windlass. To avoid working under overhanging unsupported ground, the collier only cut a short way into the seam, before sinking another adjacent shaft. This produced a row of classic bell-shape pits in cross-section, and was common practice up until the early seventeenth century. It was an inefficient method of working and the miner began moving further out from the base of the shaft by leaving a random honeycomb of columns to support the roof, commonly known as pillar and stall mining.

Coal seams generate dangerous gases, principally methane (firedamp), and carbon dioxide (choke, black or cold damp). Methane burns readily in air and is explosive in certain critical mixtures. The intensity of an explosion ranged from a rapid ‘inflammation’ to ‘blasts of unspeakable violence and velocity’, dependent upon a variety of factors such as temperature, barometric pressure, source of ignition, ratio of air to methane, whether the mix of air and gas was in motion, and presence of coal dust.⁴ Carbon dioxide often mixed with nitrogen, causing death by suffocation.

An estimated one-third of Britain’s rainfall percolates underground and water was often directed by permeable and impermeable strata into the workings, together with surface run-off down the shaft.⁵ For a pit located on higher ground, effective drainage could be achieved by driving an adit upwards into the workings from the base of the hill. Most coal pits, however, were not so favourably situated and relied on inefficient methods of drainage, such as a bucket and windlass or a rag and chain pump operated by hand. Water frequently entered the pit faster than it could be baled out. Until ventilation to remove the gases, effective drainage and the difficulties of hauling coal over greater distances began to be mastered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the depth and extent of mining operations remained small-scale.

In contrast to the soft shales of the coal measures, metalliferous ores are located in much harder rock such as limestone and granite, and are deposited in near ‘vertical fissures’ following major faultlines, in ‘horizontal flats’ caused by intrusion between bedding planes, and in cavity deposits produced by the infilling of previously formed spaces. There was no clear pattern of deposition, the lode could split, change direction, and varied greatly in width and consistency, often over short distances.⁶ Compared to the viable coal deposits, the major orefields were geographically remote, often in hilly or mountainous regions, such as the Derbyshire Peak and the Pennines, and isolated from centres of population such as the Penwith peninsula in Cornwall.

Up until the seventeenth century, metallic ore was worked from open trenches. These were several fathoms in depth, and similarly accessed by ladders and illuminated by candles. As the trench became deeper the men constructed wooden platforms above their heads to dump waste rock. These prevented the open cut from collapsing and avoided the effort and cost of hauling worthless material to the surface. Alternatively, where the lode outcropped in the side of valleys, adits were driven along the course of the vein, and galleries developed to extract the ore.

As in coal mining, penetrating below the water table was difficult without adequate drainage. Although methane was rarely encountered, the occurrence of carbon dioxide similarly demanded an efficient flow of air. Breaking ground in hard rock was much more difficult than hewing coal and involved the use of a variety of hand tools and methods. Fire setting, lime breaking and the action of plug and feathers all fractured rock, whereas ‘hand picking’ involved the skilled cutting of parallel vertical grooves into the rock face using a square-ended pick hit with a hammer, followed by the horizontal trimming of the sides.⁷ Progress was arduous and slow; averaging roughly one and a half inches per shift.⁸

The study of mortality and experience of death in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by Keith Wrightson and David Levine suggest that it is reasonable to assume that the coal miner was certainly at risk of fatal injury in this proto-industrial period. Their study of the parish registers of Wickham, a significant centre of coal production on the south bank of the Tyne, revealed an excess male mortality in the early years of marriage.⁹ This resulted from deaths both directly and indirectly (killed at the surface of the mine or at the pithead) attributable to coal mining. Michael Flinn, however, has suggested that the limited scale of early colliery operations generally kept occupational injuries and death at ‘fairly low levels’.¹⁰

Although there are no similar formal studies of mortality amongst metalliferous mining parishes, a few early descriptions do exist for the Cornish miners that depict a more favourable image. Carew had noted in 1602 that the ‘unsavourie damps doe here and there distemper heads’, but ‘not with so much daunger in the consequence as annoyance for the present’.¹¹ Robert Boyle, writing in 1725, suggested Cornish miners lived to a ‘great and vigorous age’, and William Borlase, a Cornishman living amongst miners in the far west, similarly claimed that the men ‘generally lived to a great age’ and were ‘healthy, strong and active’.¹² Labour in the metalliferous mines was both relatively casual and seasonal, and movement between occupations perhaps enabled the miners to recover their strength and vitality, and masked the pernicious effects of their labours.¹³ Only the Cornish historian William Hals (1655–1737) claimed that a copper mine was ‘a place deadly’, a ‘place that bringeth death or mischief’.¹⁴

By 1800 the constraints on depth and scale of underground operations had largely been conquered. The application of a variety of technological innovations, such as mechanical power and chemica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• General Editor’s Preface
• Foreword
• Timeline of Major Accidents, Government Inquiries, Bills and Acts of Parliament
• Glossary of Mining Terms
• Introduction
• 1 Industrialization and the Frequency and Nature of Risk
• 2 The Rise of a Reforming Interest and the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842
• 3 Organized Labour and the Home Office
• 4 Intervention in Coal Mining, 1850–1887
• 5 The Kinnaird Commission and the Regulation of Metalliferous Mining
• 6 The Metalliferous Mines Regulation Act of 1872
• 7 Scientific, Technological and Medical Advances
• 8 Hazards and Heroics
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index